


A Light Shines In The Darkness

by Eldritchhorrors



Series: The Cold Song [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anal Play, Awesome, BDSM, Character Study, Drama, Love, M/M, Music, Porn With Plot, Psychological Drama, Romance, Sex, Sherlock's Violin, Slash, Smut, dirty dirty dirty sex, no spoilers for season two, omg the smut, thinky smut, this actually has a plot too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:20:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eldritchhorrors/pseuds/Eldritchhorrors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and John's relationship is getting more intense, and not everyone is pleased about that.</p><p>Sherlock's denial isn't helping things either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Light Shines In The Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank my betas, Vector NYU and Pennypaperbrain for their superb help.
> 
> I've said this before, but it bears repeating. I'm on the autism scale, so I can say what I want about it. I write what I know and all information presented here is as factual as possible. This was written pre season two, but it can shoehorn in there nicely as well. I hope you enjoy it.

"But alas, alas!  
A light shines in the darkness,  
and the darkness comprehends it,  
and suffers..."

from Billy Budd

Composer: Benjamin Britten

Libretto: E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier

 

 

  


A Light Shines in The Darkness

 

The pearl fishers duet from Les Pecheurs De Perles. The orchestra, superb. The baritone, very nicely done, though the singer is obviously beyond his musical prime at too early an age. When had he peaked? 1998, or 1999? He’d stumbled as Wolfram, but his Falstaff the next year had been glorious. Everything since had been hit or miss.

This was one of his better performances.

It was too bad about the--

“That’s nice. What is it?”

John barreled into the room, shedding his coat and keys, smelling like the early autumn outdoors, cool menthol and sunshine, _had taken the long way around through the park, eaten roasted nuts, excessively jubilant, must have treated something bloody and/or sinister recently_. Sherlock didn’t look at him, continued lying on the sofa in his preferred listening position, but he knew the smile that type of mood would put on John’s face, knew that John would be grabbing his mug, _red, chipped in two places_ , _off limits to Sherlock_ , and putting the kettle on.

“Mmm. No. His melismas sound like the product of a petite mal seizure.”

“Then why are you listening to it?”

“Everything but the tenor.”

“Snob.” The affectionate voice belied the mild insult. Not that insults mattered.

“Quite. His Salut Demeure from Faust was so terrible I would imagine that it drove many to suicide.” Though with the way he butchered that exposed high C, _C5, 523.251 hertz of utter shite_ \-- “Or manslaughter.”

John laughed.

“If Lestrade approached me about his unexpected demise, I might find myself suddenly preoccupied with the need to wash my hair.”

“And convince Donovan that you really are a serial killer?” John snorted, and Sherlock heard the sugar spoon tap against the side of his cup. Two sugars, John was definitely feeling upbeat; he usually had a doctor’s disgusting habit of healthy living through denial. “Very Hannibal Lecter of you.”

“You told me I should cultivate a hobby.“

“Mmhm. You have a hobby now.” John’s voice went low.

Ah.

That tone, the one that raised the hair on Sherlock’s arms. Sherlock had gotten to know the sexual nuances of John’s voice better in the last few weeks. John’s voice would dip into a deeper register, a slight gravelly quality that never failed to crawl over Sherlock’s skin and nestle in his chest, an uncomfortable but not unwelcome squatter that signaled a segue into something new and fascinating. John hadn’t repeated himself yet, was still feeling out Sherlock’s triggers. But Sherlock didn’t want to seem too eager-- wasn’t too eager. He didn’t need this, but John was a tolerable alternative to boredom. A...hobby. “Do I? I was thinking apiculture would--”

“Get us evicted, yes.”

Sherlock smirked, but the move was short-lived, because John was suddenly behind him, arm wrapped around Sherlock’s shoulder, and his neck. His throat. Sherlock would have tried to break the hold, brought his arms up to do it, but John pulled his head back by the hair at his crown, pulled it taut at the temples, the eyelids, smoothing away the epicanthic folds, and Sherlock could feel cool pressure just above his collarbone. A knife. The very illegal half-serrated K-bar that John often kept in his short boot.

John had a knife to his throat.

Sherlock would have said something, but even the act of swallowing flexed his throat into the wicked sharp edge of the blade.

“Don’t talk. Don’t move.”

John’s voice was normally so mild, but it could become hard like a fist, carrying a ring of truth that raised goosebumps on Sherlock’s skin. A John that could smite. Sherlock moved his half-raised arms a fraction to test the waters, and lowered them the rest of the way to the cushion when John allowed it. The voice, the knife, the utter sneaky surprise thrill of it -- clever John, who must have been planning this. John hadn’t been pleased because of what he’d done earlier in the day, but was excited over what he was about to do. He hadn’t been making tea, he’d just made the expected noises.

Bra- _vo_.

The edge of the blade scraped up Sherlock’s neck toward his chin, then back down again to rest against his collarbone. John was breathing in his ear now, teasing out his tongue to flick at the lobe. His hold on Sherlock’s chest relaxed since the knife held him adequately captive, and he used that hand to his advantage, running his palm over Sherlock; shoulder, pec, nipple, abdomen, using his nails to scrape a trail back towards Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock’s heart was pounding, and he knew John could feel it through the his t-shirt.

He was awash with a complicated cocktail of hormones. Human fear response and adrenaline, the anticipation of pain and punishment, an almost paternal pride in his _friend comrade colleague dominant blogger lover_ , the sickly sweet creep of sexual desire flooding his brain with illogical want. Ocytocin. Chemical reactions fighting for primacy.

How was John so perfect?

He knew, logically, that John wouldn’t hurt him (much), but for one glistening moment logic took a backseat to the visceral human need to do something. A fifth, relatively undocumented, response to acute stress, one that would need to be addressed, since the works of Gray and Bracha were obviously deficient. Freeze, flight, fight, forfeit-- fuck.

Sherlock made a noise in the back of his throat, part gasp, part whimper, but he wasn’t embarrassed, was never embarrassed by _truth_. John slid his hand up to Sherlock’s mouth, two fingers rubbing over his bottom lip, then dipping in to feel the hot interior, feel his teeth, before they slid wet trails back over his lip and cheekbone, leaving a wet smear of saliva to cool in their wake.

The knife moved away a scant centimeter, enough to talk, but close enough to feel the ghost of the blade.

“What’s your safeword?”

“The same as last week.”

The knife tightened, no pain, but there was a sudden welling of moisture at his collar, then a slight sting.

Blood.

 _Nicked him_.

Sherlock groaned at the way John clarified the vector of this encounter, had to restrain his hips, which wanted to buck at the air as if it could provide friction.

“Not joking, Sherlock. Safeword.”

The not joking part was what made this so important, so amazing, but Sherlock couldn’t not buck at John’s strictures to find the limits of this voluntary cage. How far could he push John? How would John push back? It was a question of how, not would. And now bloodletting was on the table. John didn’t promise what he wasn’t able to deliver.

 _Brilliant_.

“Crucible.”

John fingered the collar of the gray tee-shirt that had seen Sherlock through so many evenings as a druggie, the uniform of a psychotropic foot soldier.

“Are you married to this shirt?”

“What?” He realized a moment later what John had meant, but he was feeling slow, slow, off-kilter, already phasing into a different awareness, and John had barely touched him.

“Too late.”

Sherlock had only a moment to process that before the knife kissed the collar, sawing at the thicker-knit ribbing and seam before it started to part the front like the slow glide of a boat’s prow cutting through water, the newly-cut edge curling under. It seemed to take forever for the steel to meet the bottom stitch, which was parted with a quick flick of John’s wrist. His free hand, cool and steady, came up to pull the shirt edges to the side, to stroke bare, pale skin and darker nipples that pulled tight under his palm. Wherever that hand touched the other was sure to follow, trailing the knife’s point against skin, so soft it wasn’t even leaving a visible mark.

Sherlock sucked in his stomach as the knife traveled to the indentation there, the slight tickle feeding the want that trailed in its wake. John took the opportunity to shift around to Sherlock’s side and the easier access it provided. The knife hesitated only briefly over the drawstring of Sherlock’s pajama bottoms, then John was pulling the knot away from the scattering of hair low on Sherlock’s belly, working the knife into the fly and then up to sever the waist band. It happened within moments, and suddenly all of Sherlock’s most vulnerable soft tissue -- belly, testicles, hardening cock -- was bared to John, the crazy war veteran with the huge knife and a wild look in his eyes.

It was ridiculously hot.

Sherlock was expecting John to approach him more aggressively, but he backed away instead.

“Remember. Don’t move.”

John slid along the length of the sofa, coming to a stop at Sherlock’s bare feet before smiling in a way that promised predation. The tip of the knife rested at Sherlock’s heel for a moment before climbing softly up the arch of his foot. It tickled. Lord, did it tickle, but he couldn’t move without risking a cut to a tender area, a heavy bleed area. The steel didn’t dwell on his arch though, it moved to his ankle, then to his inseam, catching the material before ripping up, oh god, ripping up towards the apex of his thighs, the blunt edge of the metal glancing against his leg as it made it’s way towards perineum, scrotum.

No. Sherlock wasn’t going to move at all. Not when he felt cold steel press against the sudden fullness of his bollocks, or when John grabbed the little remaining material and ripped it down Sherlock’s legs to hang in tatters. John surged up and pressed against him, full length and clothed in denim, jumper, cotton duck coat that still retained a breath of cool outdoor air, a complete juxtaposition to Sherlock’s immobile nudity, knife poised against one cheek as John smoothed the other with his hand, the solid weight of him soothing rather than stifling.

Odd.

“You are so good. So good. You’re doing beautifully.” From anyone else it would sound like the condescending tripe tops fed subs to keep them docile and willing.

Somehow, this was the part that hurt most. The moments when John was soft with his hands and warm with his praise. It created a tight feeling in Sherlock’s stomach, and he almost flinched away when it happened, but he also felt warm and wanted in a way he hadn’t experienced since he was [redact]. John eclipsed his natural recoil from such sentimental tripe like a comforting sun, and Sherlock wasn’t even sure how.

Very, very odd.

Instead, he looked away, not able to look at John’s face, the face he knew better than his own. Better than anyone’s, even...

John kissed the edge of his mouth, ran his nose along the line of Sherlock’s jaw until he could whisper directly into his ear.

“Do you remember the first time you smelled blood? Really smelled it? When there was enough of it that the scent got into everything, was everywhere?”

“Yes.”

“You get used to it, it gets familiar, but you don’t forget the smell.”

Sherlock didn’t think John needed an answer here, but he nodded anyway. The first time he had scented blood like that had been just after uni, when he’d utterly destroyed his raison d'être and hadn’t found a new niche.

Rudderless. No direction. A shrine built of doubt and drugs.

He’d just come from a pub, stumbled across a recent suicide in a back alley, someone who had jumped from a high rise. It had been...the body had split along the seams like a rag doll. He would have deleted it if it hadn’t been for what followed.

Despite his less than stellar opinion of the police, he’d called in his discovery and waited for a harried, handsome detective sergeant who was just going gray. To his surprise, the DS was polite, listened to what he had to say, and then asked him to clarify his conclusions. He’d sounded skeptical about Sherlock’s insistence on suicide, a pregnant girlfriend, and too many anti-depressants, but he’d noted everything before letting Sherlock go.

Lestrade had called him back two days later to confirm everything that he’d said. Then he’d invited him out for coffee to pick that “odd fecking brain of yours”.

It had worked out. Sherlock had found something to do, and Lestrade said he got more gray as a result. Sherlock insisted that correlation was not causation, and Lestrade told him to get bent.

“You’d think it would have been medical school, but when I was sixteen a car hit a lamppost near the shop me and my mates were coming out of.” John’s eyes were bright with a combination of the memory and his current position atop Sherlock. “I ran over to help, but the driver had taken the gearstick through a lung. Sucking chest wound. We tried to seal the suction with some cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, but it was too little, too late. My hands and knees were covered in blood. I should have been sick to my stomach, but I was just so excited, so full of adrenaline. Shaking. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”

“Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory.”

“So you understand?”

“The excitement? We are not...unalike.”

“It’s primal.”

“Recapturing the past?”

“A feeling. So you understand why I’m going to cut you now. It won’t be deep, but there will be blood. Are you okay with that?”

Sherlock took a shuddering breath, let his head fall back as he closed his eyes. “Please.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say please.”

“It’s only the fourth time I’ve meant it.”

John scooted back till he was straddling Sherlock’s thighs. He took Sherlock’s arms, limp and trusting in his grip, and manipulated him like a marionette, stretching them up, exposing soft white flesh from armpit to the inner wrist. Sherlock left them where John put them, obeying the implied order.

John was incomprehensible in this mood. His chest was a rapid flutter, eyes gleaming with something bright and electric as he looked at Sherlock spread out for him, hamstrung only by choice, an odalisque only for John. Sherlock could often predict John’s behavior, his decisions, but never in a scene, never about something emotional. Where would John start? Resilient skin with fewer pain receptors -- across the extensors, the pectorals? Areas that bled copiously -- the ears, the throat?

John reached out his empty hand to run a finger from Sherlock’s inner elbow down the ulnar nerve to his armpit.

The soft, the vulnerable, then.

The second bite of the knife was as surprising as the first. The tip touched his inner elbow, then whispered along the skin, blossoming a sodium sting and a small amount of blood, down, down. The line of red was hair-thin, and would heal in just a day or two. Not quite a paper cut, but not much more than that either. A light flex to his biceps, and Sherlock could feel the part of skin, the citrus tang of air hitting newly exposed dermal layers. John traced the knife down, alternating pressure so that the line down his forearm to his wrist was intermittent, fading to nothing before blooming once again in blood and nettle.

The shiver that crawled over Sherlock was completely involuntary, completely delicious.

Sherlock had visible blue veins, a ghost of color on his pale skin, and small moles sprinkled like a pinch of confetti. John was lightly tracing those veins, probably thinking about intravenous drug use _76% probability_ , and medical jargon learned in anatomy _12%_. The knife came to a pause at Sherlock’s inner wrist, the skin thin and translucent over prominent tendons. Sherlock had hit a tendon once before, when he’d just started shooting up and he was experimenting with technique. Muscle pops were uncomfortable and made him queasy, leaving him sore in his bicep, stomach, thighs, wherever he had injected, left ugly bruises. The inner arm was convenient and easy. The wrist -- the wrist was a minefield. Too deep, too wrong, and the needle penetrated the tendon -- agonizing pain. He’d never done it again. But John, John knew what he was doing, that much was obvious.

The knife flashed, this time a quick cut that he felt all the way to his groin, his toes, flash fire in his mind that made him cry out. A little deeper, straight across the wrist. The blood welled immediately, burgeoning in a thick line that reached the extent of it’s surface tension before it broke and began to run down his arm, felt but not seen. He could imagine the red dark of oxidation against his skin, a contrast to the white and watercolor blue of it pumping so close to the surface, could see it in the way John looked at him now.

John stared at him, hungry and raptor fierce. His face, his eyes, his wrist. The wrist he grabbed in the other hand, squeezing the flesh to milk it, bringing his hand up, up, a parody of courtly love, placing a kiss to the palm, a chaste kiss to that wrist, right on the cut, painting his lips as red and wrong as a whore’s.

Sherlock was positive he was clean, positive that John was clean, but the danger of it rocked him-- made him want it more. Made Sherlock want to taste his own blood from John’s lips, slippery iron salt and the taste of John. The chase. Pain and comfort and too much conflicting data to catalogue properly.

“Yes.”

Everything after that was a haze of short sharp thrills of pain, John’s lips, red. John’s lips, pressed to his side, his chest, his collarbone, where thigh met torso. John’s lips, meeting his own in sloppy relief -- mouth, cheeks, face, sticky with a parody of mussed blowjob lipstick turning to terra cotta.

The primal smell of molten metal, the taste of fluid salts scenting the air.

John.

Everything eventually stopped after a decade, an age. Maybe only minutes, seconds. The merry-go-round slowed and stilled, coming to rest on a fixed point. John, _John_ \-- the only motion or feeling, the only color the red that he painted them with. The only sound, Sherlock’s cries and John’s praise. The only feeling -- relief. Release.

And finally, John above him, clasping Sherlock’s face in his hands, knife abandoned, red thumbs at the corners of his eyes turning pink as they diluted with gathering moisture.

“I’ve got you,” John said.

“It’s all right. I don’t know why...”

“Stunning. You’re stunning.” John’s voice was fervent. An apostle, a fanatic.

“Please.”

“What do you need?”

“I don’t know.” Sherlock couldn’t stop the way his eyes were leaking. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear the film blocking his vision. “But I mean it this time as well.”

John settled his weight on Sherlock, half to the side, and wrapped him up in his arms. “How about this? Is this good?” His voice was unsure, an about face from the man he had been just minutes ago.

“Perfect. It’s perfect, John. It’s...”

And the incongruous thing about it, the thing that jarred him, burned through every faulty resistor -- was that it was.

\--- --- ---

There’d been the barest mention of the first murder/rape in the paper, but his informant at the Yard, _trusting-copper unlikely-crush both career and sexual in nature informant status half life six months already three months in, 75% probability_ , had told him the basic facts of the case, enough to indicate that another was probably on the horizon.

Lestrade had come round that morning.

John had been in the kitchen making tea, humming along to Nixon and Mao singing their hopes for a better relationship while Sherlock ran a polishing cloth over the purfling and ribs of his violin. Sherlock normally hated it when people hummed along to music, felt it was the hallmark of a musical philistine, but John was beginning to appreciate the nuances of Sherlock’s musical choices, and he wouldn’t want to halt the progress he was making in John’s surreptitious cultural education. And when John started singing ‘gom-pei’ with a laugh and a whoop, it could only bring a smile to his face.

“John Adams is rolling in his grave.”

“I thought he was still alive?” John scratched his head. “Did the Oppenheimer one, yeah?” He put Sherlock’s tea on the coffee table and retreated back to the kitchen, not even trying to hide his smug smile.

“In his grave because you put him there.”

“Oh, shut it.” John plopped into his chair with his own mug and a plate of toast that he shoved towards Sherlock. “Violin later, food now.”

“I --”

“No argument. Eat. You didn’t really lose any blood, but you’re healing, and --”

“I was only going to say I wanted Marmite.”

“Oh!”

There wasn’t much talking after that, just the scrape of Marmite across the toast and tea cups clinking on the table while Mao derided Confucian philosophy through the medium of song.

John was in a glorious mood. Had been, for the past several weeks. Sherlock only saw the borderline traumatized soldier in small moments when he caught John looking at him unawares, islands of dark quiet in an otherwise cheerful facade. Months, even weeks ago, he would have said that there was little facade to John, little to hide behind, but he could see now where he had been wrong. Could see the way John looked at him over the rim of his cup, fascinated and confused, unsure and almost...

No.

Not quite.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock and John set down their cups, and Sherlock wolfed down the last of his toast in two bites as Lestrade came up the stairs a few days earlier than Sherlock had anticipated. Sherlock looked down at himself to check that the dressing gown and long-sleeved jumper covered the skinny red lines John had mapped on his body. He wasn’t sure how open John wanted to be about their...relationship, but Sherlock would err on the side of caution.

Lestrade poked his head in the door, tapping a manila folder, raising an eyebrow in question. “You up for it?”

“The Williamson murder.”

“And one last night, same M.O., Body found behind a bar, this time in Canary Wharf. Victim still unidentified.”

“Give me the folder to look over on the way there.”

“I can drive you.”

“I’d prefer a taxi.” Sherlock nodded to John, who was already dressed in a navy jumper and brown cords with thick whaling, _predates gun wound slightly large John still isn’t up to original weight must work on that_. Lestrade was already out the door as Sherlock rushed to his room for a flurry of trousers, shirt, socks, jacket. He stopped in front of the living room mirror and fussed about his throat and the line of red there. The shirt looked stupid buttoned up to the top, but the other options were unacceptable.

“Why not wear a tie?”

“I never wear ties. I don’t even own one.”

“What, never?” John handed Sherlock his overcoat after shrugging on his own.

“What was my one big demand, John?”

“No bond -- oh.”

Sherlock looked at John with steady eyes and held that tableau for another moment before spinning round to hop down the steps, wondering what had motivated him to let John know.

Know what?

Know...

Sherlock knew his own mind backwards and forwards, its tangential vectors and leaps of logic, its rigid rationalism, the nature of things better kept locked away, but he’d become increasingly suspicious of his own motivations lately.

He didn’t need the cocaine. He didn’t need John. He’d thought that this thing between them would be a convenient release, an occasional release, just like the drugs, but he’d found himself looking forward to John. Anticipating...

...John.

It was supremely awkward.

It was supposed to be an inverse square relationship, the intensity decreasing with greater distance from the source. They were not in bed, _the sofa the floor the wall the tub the stairwell,_ ergo, the intensity of their interaction should be lessened. He had calculated the probabilities to a comfortable margin.

Apparently the mathematical models that worked for the fluid dynamics of sound didn’t translate to the issue of John in any real or meaningful way.

Sherlock had left his scarf, but John had grabbed it in their rush out the door, and now he stood on the pavement and draped it over Sherlock’s neck, unbuttoning Sherlock’s top two buttons and tucking the ends of his scarf into the coat to hide the lines left by the knife, putting it in place with a final pat to Sherlock‘s chest.

Something inside Sherlock went hot and soft and _wrong_.

There was no logarithmic scale that could quantify these reactions.

It should not have meant anything. Not at all.

But in the quiet rarefaction of the cab he could barely think of the case.

\--- --- ---

John was, if not good with emotions, then much better than Sherlock was at dealing with them. John, in his simpering empathy, could read Sherlock’s pensive mood now, in the quiet of the cab, and left it quiet to give Sherlock room to think.

Think about the case, instead of his personal quagmire.

Sherlock opened the folder to look at the crime photos, bypassing the waste of perfectly good tree pulp that made up the official reports. At least Anderson wasn’t the technician this time.

A few good close-ups. Face, mutilated beyond recognition. By something sharp, but not a knife. A surgeon’s scalpel? No, not quite. Larger. He would have liked a better view of her fingers, her jewelry. Legs parted grotesquely, underwear put back on after penetration, then the body posed. Stockings used to tie the hands behind her, cheap stockings, beige, not hers, shows premeditation. Could be from anywhere. Her hair...the hair, groomed after dumping.

He passed the folder to John. “What do you make of this?”

John took it but sent him a dubious look. “You’ll only tell me I’m wrong.”

Sherlock smiled. “Only if you’re not correct.”

John opened it to the photos, and Sherlock was pleased that John sniffed at the police report with as much contempt as Sherlock held.

“Uh. Young. Probably pretty. Attractive and kind of, I dunno. Arty.”

“Yes.”

“Dumped where?”

“Behind a wine bar in Spitalfields.” Sherlock took out his phone to look up the locations of both bodies relative to other businesses.

“Killer has a type?”

“Is that a leap or a deduction?”

“Bit of both?”

“I believe so. I’ll know more when we see the new scene.” He sat back to close his eyes and think about the array of possibilities the new murder could present, but all he could think of was the mutilated face in the photo, and the lack of identity for the second victim. There was something there...

“Maybe the killer didn’t want the body identified?”

“No. The hands are perfectly intact, except for the defensive wounds.”

John went back to the first photo, a close-up of face and torso. He touched the glossy paper with a careful forefinger, as if the paper was as broken as the flesh.

“Rather sad, the not knowing.” John’s fingers flexed for a moment, an aborted move for his own collar, and the dog tags that rested beneath his jumper, ID in case he was KIA.

“I have identifying marks.” Sherlock didn’t know why he said it, but he closed his eyes again. Some things were easier to say when you didn’t look.

“Everyone does.” John sounded just as even as he had earlier, apparently used to Sherlock’s tangential thought process.

“This is a dangerous life, and I didn’t want to be John Doe, so I have marks. Special marks.”

“What kind?”

“Invisible ink under the skin. Shave my head halfway up the back and it will fluoresce under a blacklight.” He smiled and looked at his hands. “Statistical analysis gave me the most likely locations to be left intact after burning or mutilation, so the mark is duplicated in four other places. Mycroft and Lestrade know. Mummy knows.”

“Statistical analysis made you tattoo yourself for easy identification.” John was quiet for a moment. “Why tell me?”

“Because I...”

Why tell John? Because he trusts John, because he thinks John would be [redact]. Because he...

Why tell John?

“John --”

The cabbie pulled over and whatever Sherlock was going to say was lost. “Canada Square.”

\--- --- ---

“Oh, look. It’s the death of the party.”

“Hello Sally. Wouldn’t worry about that test you took this weekend. Most likely a false positive.”

“I’m not pregnant, you freak.”

“I wasn’t talking about pregnancy.”

Sherlock lifted the tape stretched between brick buildings for himself and John to duck under before rushing to the area where Lestrade and a few technicians were concentrated in the middle of the alley. Sherlock pulled two pairs of nitrile gloves from his pocket and handed one to John before skinning on his own.

“Can you clear them for a few minutes?”

“Malhotra will work with you. I’ll have him pull them out, but you’ve only got a few minutes.”

Sherlock was already circling the corpse. “That’s all I need. Malhotra agrees with me about Anderson. Of course he‘ll work with me.” He made quick work of the alley itself before kneeling down to the body. The cuts on the face were imprecise, and made with a scalpel-like tool. The jewelry. The hands. He took out his magnifier to get a closer look at her cuticles. Yes. Her hair, one strand plucked from the root and examined. Her underwear...ah.

“John, did death occur before or after the facial injuries?”

John knelt, taking Sherlock’s magnifier from him to get a closer look at the skin. “Before. She’s been cleaned up before she was dumped here, but there was still some bleeding occurring after that. The wound to the chest must have been a bit off -- she didn’t die immediately.”

“He could take his time.”

“This looks amateur. He dealt the killing blow and wiped her off, but didn’t even realize that she was still alive. Everything is imprecise.”

Sherlock turned to Lestrade. “The contents of her handbag?”

“I’ve got a list. They’ve already processed it, but I have photos of it in situ.”

“Give me the list, and a list of items in the other victim’s handbag as well.”

“What are you looking for?”

Sherlock began to type into his phone. Businesses. Proprietors. Local events and societies. “I don’t know yet.”

“Anil! You have that list?”

But Sherlock was ignoring him already as the information scrolled down his phone. “The victim is an artist, very well off, so probably fairly successful, shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Find your warrant card in a Christmas cracker, did you?”

“Sherlock.”

“The clothes, the jewelry, the hands. Look at her hands! She’s well-dressed if not a bit avant garde. Turn the jewelry over. Signed, one of a kind metalwork. You could trace her by that alone. Well groomed everywhere but her hands. Short nails, rough cuticles. Harsh pigment under the nail. She’s been handling desiccants and chemicals. A sculptor then, plastics and wood would be my guess.”

“Makes sense. Williamson was a gallery owner.”

Sherlock sent a text and waited.

“Williamson was left behind a pub close to her gallery. The likelihood that this woman was left near her own haunts is...”

An artist’s biography popped up on screen.

“Beryl Newhouse. Artist-in-Residence at the Copely.”

Lestrade gave a start. “How can you tell? Hair’s not even right.”

Sherlock gave him a withering look. “The handbag list?”

A sergeant handed the lists to Lestrade who handed them to Sherlock, who looked at the lists and raised his eyebrows. He gave them to John, who also noticed a certain discrepancy if his look of comprehension was anything to go by.

“Lestrade. Next time, call me for a real case or don’t call at all. If I want to deal with lazy I’ll have tea with my brother.”

“I don’t have time for your --”

“You have time to sit around and do nothing, apparently. Her hair wasn’t right because the killer dyed it to match Williamson’s. Look at her underwear, same as Williamson’s. Exact. He bought them precisely for this purpose. He wasn’t looking for a type, he made a type.”

“Reliving his crime. “

“Yes. He’d have to be a big man, well-muscled. She’s in the middle of a long alley, and unusually tall, dense muscle, heavy. He’d have to be able to carry her down here, and a dolly couldn’t navigate past the rubbish at each end.” Sherlock pointed to the row of bins at one end, and the crates at the other.

“Not very bright, most likely disturbed.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend?” Sherlock laughed and spun around to look at John. John, who smirked back. “Do you want to tell him?”

John flushed, but looked pleased. “She was a lesbian.”

“They giving membership cards for that now?”

“Dental dams.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

“Exactly. I’m a doctor and I see them almost never. Only one reason people use them -- their partner has genital warts. They travel better than cling-film you see.”

Somehow, Lestrade’s face said disgusted and thoughtful at the same time. “But how do you know she was a lesbian?”

John shook his head at Lestrade. “Dental dams and no condoms?” John turned to Sherlock, looking for his approval, encomium.

Sherlock was obviously a bad influence on John.

And John had never looked so sexy, damn him. The last thing Sherlock needed was an erection at a crime scene. He normally didn’t care what rumors flitted through the Yarders’ empty little heads, but he drew the line at accusations of necrophilia.

So he ignored John, taking a sheaf of photos from the folder Lestrade had given him. He pointed to one facial close-up, then another. “Their faces were mutilated with different tools. The first weapon was something like a box cutter, larger wounds but a razor’s profile. The second was an X-acto blade, smaller, common in a sculptor’s studio so she was probably murdered there. These are weapons of opportunity, so the box cutter might indicate deliveries. See if Williamson’s gallery and the Copely use the same service.”

Sherlock scowled and gestured at everything with a windmilling hand. “That was three minutes’ work. Possibly a record. And hardly worth my time.” He shoved the rumpled folder at Lestrade’s chest.

“That’s a killer off the streets.” Lestrade had on that fatherly chiding look that made Sherlock’s lip curl up.

“You act like catching them is the important part.”

“Isn‘t it?”

“I’m afraid I’m much more...process-oriented.”

And Sherlock spun on his heel and walked off, disappointment bitter in his mouth, like coffee too long in the pot. There was a shout from behind him, but he ignored it, pushing past a still-fuming Sally and the tails of crime scene tape whipping around in the slight breeze.

He’d needed this, needed the distraction, the perfect tunnel vision clarity that only came with a case -- or pain. Or coke.

He’d thought he would use John to distract him from a lack of cases -- now he needed a case to distract himself from John.

Merde.

He’d walked away from the scene, leaving John to catch a cab. He needed distance and perspective to think. The flat was usually perfect for contemplation of a problem, but this time it housed...not a problem, but an aspect of his life that continually defied categorization.

He couldn’t have the flat, so instead he’d have a walk. A poor trade.

This was his own fault. Any projections he’d made were unreliable, since John wasn’t the independent variable Sherlock had planned for. John was supposed to hurt him when he wanted it and be suitably grateful for the opportunity. Sherlock had planned his own classical conditioning, but now it all went out the window since John had hijacked his ideal path and created his own technique for operant conditioning.

And John was truly _gifted_.

If Sherlock hadn’t known any better, and he did, he’d have assumed that John was much more aware of his own ability to manipulate with the tools at his disposal. He was already seen as eminently trustworthy due to societal baby-face bias. Sherlock exploited his own attractiveness, but he himself had fallen into the trap of associating John with innocence and honesty. Teddy bears going round the garden.

What bollocks.

Sherlock reached a hand to his throat, to the tender lines of healing skin beneath his scarf, and frowned.

\--- --- ---

Sherlock had ditched him, again. Sherlock was there one moment, praising John with his words and eyes, berating Lestrade and looking mutinous about the lack of a puzzle, then he was gone, down the street and into a cab to god knows where. He left John to make his own way back by tube, because the cost of that many cabs in one day offended his middle class sense of rightness according to Sherlock.

He was surprised about the approbation, not the abandonment. Sherlock looking to him expecting the correct answer was a sweet boost to his ego, but the abandonment was very much status quo, even if the reason behind it was not. Sherlock had been pensive even before the case, but it was something that was making him…on anyone else John would have called it twitchy, but of course Sherlock didn‘t do anything as plebeian as twitch. Those long fingers of his wouldn’t stay still, and Sherlock kept aborting their movement only to have them resume twisting and tapping. Sherlock was usually statue-solemn when he was thinking, and the aberrant behavior said something unique must be happening behind those cool eyes. It must have been something to do with him, because Sherlock hadn’t stopped slanting him these long considering looks, some amused, some serious.

And now Sherlock had left, looking rather grim and lost, with no new mystery to keep him occupied. His mind must be worrying at something else, and John was pretty sure that that something was John.

Which did nothing for his confidence, even if he had been expecting it.

Expectation was not acceptance, and _damn it_ , his inner monologue was beginning to sound like Sherlock.

He didn’t think that Sherlock was reconsidering their relationship. They’d just gotten started, and surely he would want more data from an experiment than what he’d gleaned so far. But it was pretty obvious that whatever he was considering wasn’t lightweight, either.

He hoped to god that Sherlock wasn’t bothered by the knife play. He hadn’t seemed bothered at the time. Well, he’d been bothered, but it was a good sort of…

John felt rather queasy at the thought. Could edge play taken a bit too far have made Sherlock start to question what was happening between them? Did he need to renegotiate? Had John been wrong?

Sherlock had been _amazing_. Was always amazing. Beautiful. John had never connected with anyone on the level that they connected, and adding something as primal as blood, sweat, semen, pain, that made it even more intimate.

Definitely not enough data. Not that it was very comforting to think about himself as just a unit of information. A thing, not a person. Not a mass of hope and insecurity and feelings with no security net to catch him because he‘d gotten way too deep over a man who wanted to be a robot.

Bugger.

The day probably couldn’t get any lower than _that_ thought.

When John got back to the flat, alone, he was unsurprised to find Mycroft sitting in a chair, waiting, umbrella against one knee and a Blackberry in the other hand.

“Mycroft.” He didn’t trust Mycroft at all. Probably a side effect of Sherlock’s mistrust coupled with a hefty dose of respect for the way Mycroft manipulated his innate patriotism. He knew Mycroft was doing it. He could see Mycroft doing it, and John still had to take the bait because it was for queen and country.

Mycroft slipped the phone into a pocket and gave him that quick bored once-over that the siblings shared. Deducing everything about him, no doubt. Well, deduce away. When one lived with Sherlock, one got used to having few secrets.

“Dr. Watson.”

From the arctic tone of Mycroft’s voice, make that no secrets. A hidden part of John cringed.

“What happened to calling me John?” Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. John sat in the chair opposite Mycroft and tried to look unconcerned. Upright military living was excellent for cultivating a poker face.

Mycroft gave him a long look, and didn’t jump in with unnecessary words. But John was good with silence, had been even before meeting Sherlock and dealing with his hours of intense, concentrated quiet, as fierce as the hours of manic activity that could follow.

“Look, I know why you’re here, so can we stop the cryptic study and get on with it? Consider me intimidated and start with the...” John trailed off and waved his hand.

Mycroft sighed in the same way that he sighed over Sherlock, and John considered that a win. Just as exasperating as Sherlock? He was moving up in the world.

“What do you know about Victor Trevor?”

Now that made John go still. He knew just enough outside of the name to make him want to know more, but -- “Enough to know that it’s none of our business unless Sherlock wants it to be.” He wouldn’t go behind Sherlock’s back, even if he thought that Sherlock would have no such compunction if the situation were reversed. “Enough to know I’d like to punch him in the face.”

“He told you?”

John could only smile at him, a wry, sad little thing. “I deduced it.”

Mycroft scowled. Seeing Sherlock‘s expression on Mycroft was incongruous, and at the same time it drove home just how close they must have been at one point. It looked better on Sherlock. “Sherlock made it my business a long time ago. And he definitely made it your business, what? Two weeks ago?” Mycroft raised an eyebrow, and that looked better on Sherlock as well. If Mycroft’s sneer fell flat Sherlock would have a hat trick.

“Three.” John said it automatically, then mentally kicked himself. Stupid. So stupid! Sherlock had said that one of the best ways to get information from a subject was to make them correct you by being deliberately wrong, and here he had fallen into the same trap. He didn’t know what Mycroft was angling for, but John had a feeling that it would not be to his benefit.

“Three weeks. Victor Trevor lasted six months, but they didn’t have the previous relationship that you...enjoyed...with my brother.”

“Sherlock is fine.” He was almost positive.

“Fine means nothing!” Mycroft looked almost shocked at his own outburst, then schooled his face back under control. “I’m sure he’s filled your head with all sorts of ideas about how I want to control him -- “

John snorted. “Sherlock doesn’t actually tell me much. But I’m not blind.”

“Yet you don’t see.”

“You kidnapped me and tried to bribe me the first night we met. He’s off the drugs and doing quite well. I’d think you’d be happy.”

“For how long? Sherlock has a habit of replacing one dark thing with another. Victor. Drugs. Detection. _You_.”

A cold feeling swept up John’s spine like the hand of a corpse. “I don’t like what you are implying.”

“I’m not implying anything. Your relationship has taken a turn for the unhealthy. I approved of your friendship, doctor, but this is something quite different.” He examined his dominant hand, long fingers like Sherlock’s, slender and expensively manicured. “Interesting marks on my brother this morning.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He hated this, the judgment and accusation, an echo of something interred too deep in his own core to be expunged. His own appetites, so familiar, so likely to do more harm than good, and how was he to know, anyway? What if this was only reinforcing Sherlock’s problems? John might only be an ineffectual plaster on a much bigger wound.

But there was another, greater what if…what if this was exactly what Sherlock needed?

“Our relationship is just getting started, we’re both consenting, and it’s better than doing bloody cocaine.” Sherlock was a grown man who’d been taking care of himself for years. He was also a genius who could make his own decisions about the hows and whys of dealing with it. But Mycroft had shaken him, by knowing, by being here, and John hoped like hell that the shaking of confidence wasn’t reflected in his voice. “It’s none of your damn business.”

“It is when I have to worry about the aftermath.” Mycroft crossed his hands and his legs, managing to look like the most pedantic lemon-sucking toff ever. It was an uncharitable thought, but John wasn‘t feeling much charity at the moment. He wanted Mycroft gone, gone so he could think. “I did the cleanup after his last relationship. You and your...ilk...will come and go, but I’m immutable, so this is very much within my purview.”

“That’s not going to happen.” John wouldn’t let it happen. He was no Victor, and Sherlock was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. Even if, when, this ended, it wouldn’t be because of anything John had done. It wouldn’t end with an explosion, but a whimper, because Sherlock wouldn’t freak over a break-up that he’d initiated through boredom. It wouldn’t end because John had damaged Sherlock in some way, mental or physical. John would call a halt himself before it got to that point.

And John’d be damned if they wouldn’t remain friends.

“Because this is so different?”

John felt inexplicably hurt at the disbelief in Mycroft’s voice. Hurt and anger. As if months of surveillance hadn’t shown him who and what John was. He didn’t trust Mycroft, but he’d rather liked him all the same. And he’d thought that Mycroft held him in some small affection too. “This _is_ different.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes. “Sherlock breaks his toys, or they break him. Victor -- “

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not a toy. I’m not Victor, he isn’t the same Sherlock. And in case you missed it during our first interview, _Mycroft_ , I’m not breakable.”

“Quite right.”

John and Mycroft looked up at the door, and Sherlock, who pulled off his gloves with an angry grimace before tossing them aside.

“Mycroft.” He leaned against the door jamb, arms crossed defensively across his chest.

“I assure you that it is only concern for your wellbeing that has prompted this visit.” Mycroft got the words out fast, as if heading off any question Sherlock might have posed, but the attempt was wasted.

“Get out of my flat.”

“Not until--”

“I know what you are going to say. Consider it said and get out of my flat.”

“Know everything that comes out of my mouth, hmm? How about this?” Mycroft smiled that humorless little lip pucker of his and managed to look both smug and uncomfortable. “Crucible.”

John flinched.

Sherlock tightened his own lips, then nodded towards John without taking his eyes off his brother.

“Yes, John is different.”

“How?”

“That’s not how this works. I owe you nothing, no explanations, no justifications. You, however...you owe me _everything_.”

“Sherlock…”

“I don’t need to ‘ease your mind’, or whatever it is you’d like to label it. I don’t need to do anything to help you sleep at night.” Sherlock stalked across the room, yanking off his coat as he went, throwing it over the back of a chair. The scarf went with it, and the marks on his skin stood out, livid and accusatory in the tense well that yawned between them. “You forget that our similarities are surface only. You think you understand the workings of my mind, but you haven’t been in my mind in any real way. This is beyond your comprehension but that doesn’t mean it’s a terrible thing. Your data is wrong.”

He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, baring his forearms and completely unapologetic about the livid map of healing tissue he revealed. “Basic physics. You’re no longer observing us, you’re observing the effects of watching us.” He snorted in derision. “You never could properly divorce yourself from a study.” Sherlock stopped near the fireplace, spine drawn tense like a bow and fingers flexing like he was restraining the explosive force of a punch. “There’s another difference between you and me, dear brother. There’s no shame in what _I_ do.” He canted his head toward John, catching his eye, and John knew that he meant it for him.

John never knew he could feel so buoyant in the middle of a domestic pile-up.

When Sherlock turned to look at Mycroft again, his face was grim.

“John’s presence here is not up for debate, interference or barter.” Sherlock picked up his violin, and the freshly rosined bow which he used as a pointer, stabbing the air to punctuate his words.

“You’ve ruined every good thing I’ve ever had. I don’t need you to ruin this too.”

“Sherlock, I...” Mycroft looked haggard, and John almost felt sorry for him, because he truly did believe that Mycroft worried about Sherlock constantly. He just didn’t like the way that concern manifested.

A bleeding heart was bloody inconvenient sometimes.

But Sherlock turned his back on them, bringing the violin to his chin, and the bow up in the familiar bow hold. A statement. a dismissal.

“John is off the table. Leave him alone. Leave me alone.”

“Or what?”

There was a pause, the quiet before Oppenheimer scorched the landscape, but when Sherlock finally spoke it was vicious. Rabid. “If he suffers because of you, in any capacity, I’ll make sure Lestrade knows just how culpable you are in--”

“No. You would never dredge that up for something so petty.” But Mycroft didn’t sound confident.

“You think this is petty? Trivial?” His voice was quieter, but no less savage. “That this isn’t important?” Sherlock dragged the bow against the strings like he‘d shown John, E, A, D, G, fingers flexing against them before launching into a piece of music. It was something John recognized, something Sherlock played when he was melancholy. Bleak, hopeless, the grey mauve of heartbreak. Shubert’s Death and the Maiden, the beginning of the second movement. He’d discussed it with Sherlock before when Sherlock waxed lyrical about chamber music.

He’d thought Sherlock was trying to shut them out, and he was, but there was some subtext that he was missing, some significance that completely passed him by, because the music began to fill the room, poignant and sad, and Mycroft tensed, hand clenched on the handle of his umbrella, face turned white and ghastly as it leeched of all color.

He hadn’t known Mycroft had enough emotion to feel, let alone that deeply.

But then, John hadn’t known that music could be a threat.

There was a heartbeat of agony – two, three – before Mycroft was able to get his expression reassembled into something other than horror, but he still stumbled as he stood, umbrella in his hand.

When Mycroft rushed away without a word John was no longer surprised. No longer could be surprised.

When the outer door clicked shut Sherlock ended his playing with a screech of the A string. He tossed the bow down so that it clattered across the table top, making John wince because he had an idea of how much the bow alone was worth. The violin was placed down with the same care Sherlock always used, safe from the vagaries of his mood.

Sherlock worshipped that violin.

“That neurotypical bastard!”

John expected Sherlock to do something, anything, because he could feel how spring-tight the man was, almost vibrating under compression, ready to escape and cry havoc.

But Sherlock just stood there, head bent forward over slender fingers, hands pressed palm to palm in a way that would have been angelic if the anger hadn’t been a tangible visitor in the flat. No violence, no ranting or pouting. John knew he was thinking, but couldn’t guess at what. He didn’t think Sherlock was reconsidering this thing between them, especially not twice in a day. Mycroft, at least, had made sure that they’d cleave together through sheer bloody-mindedness even if everything else was burnt out to a cinder.

No. John wouldn’t let that happen.

John was never one to err on the side of caution, so he went to Sherlock and placed a hand on his shoulder blade, resting, not gripping. The wing of bone was sharp under the skin, and the muscle surrounding it was strained thin, wires through a draw plate. Sherlock barely acknowledged him, only inclined his head to the side to nod at John, but it was enough.

“What he says makes no never mind to me.” It was a lie and they both knew it, but it was one that Sherlock let by.

“I know. It’s just his usual leitmotif anyway.”

John wanted to ask Sherlock why he was so upset then, nosy Mycroft being business as usual, but the memory of the unspoken conversation between the brothers kept him from broaching the subject.

“John.”

“I don’t...”John still felt a small awkwardness over anything emotionally significant that featured an unsexed Sherlock, but he ploughed on anyway. “Do you…” John stopped himself. There was so much he wanted to ask Sherlock, but there were also so many subjects he didn’t feel he could discuss.

“I don’t want to end this.”

Sherlock’s admission was palliative, and John felt something that had become tight and hard in self-defense ease under the removal of stress. “Good. That’s good.”

“Yes.” But Sherlock still sounded unsure.

“Was it. Yesterday was…was it too much?” John thought it had been as close as he could get to contentment, but maybe Sherlock had a different idea of what made for a good mesh. Emotions weren’t ‘John’s area’ either, and maybe he’d gone too deep into unexplored territory. Assumed too much.

“No. It’s not that.” Sherlock was vehement without raising his voice. “That was…good.”

“Uh. Good. I guess.” John felt awkward and out of his depth, tried not to shuffle around in embarrassment at being so caught out. He was supposed to be Sherlock’s boyfriend and sometimes top, dominant, whatever. He should be able to fix things that required fixing. Give Sherlock what he needed, like he’d promised.

Hard to be a white knight when you didn’t know what to slay.

“Can I do anything? Other than shoot him?”

“Humor to lighten the mood?”

“Thought I’d give it a try.”

“Not now. No levity.” Sherlock looked at John now, sizing him up for something. John just hoped he wasn’t found wanting. “We originally agreed to scene only a few times a week, and never twice in a row.”

“Yes.”

“I would like to renegotiate for special circumstances.”

John ran his fingers through his hair and over his face, trying to process that. “I don’t know. Are you sure? This is probably just a reaction to Mycroft --”

“It is a reaction to Mycroft. But not the one you imagine. I’m not thumbing my nose at him. I don’t want to think about any of this right now.”

“Special circumstances?”

“Special circumstances.”

“Alright. Okay. We can do this.” John looked at him, convincing himself halfway. “But come here. Please.” He waited for Sherlock to evaluate the request and make a decision before crossing the few feet between them to stand in front of John. Sherlock ducked a little bit to be a little more of a height with John and it was foolish-looking and endearing all at once, two qualities he never would have associated with Sherlock. It made him want to laugh, but laughter right now would be a bad thing, so he smiled instead. “Will you kiss me? I just need some convincing. None of that really left me in the mood.”

Sherlock stared at him blankly for a moment, then ducked his head even more to press his lips against John’s. This wasn’t a scene kiss, but a boyfriend kiss. Soft lips met John’s, soft breath. Soft, soft. Sherlock’s tongue parted his lips and insinuated its way into John’s mouth, lazy and unhurried, happy just to stroke and touch. John could feel Sherlock humming into the kiss, a warm vibration that traveled across his skin and made him shiver when the hairs at his nape stood at attention.

When the kiss ended John buried his head in the crook of Sherlock’s neck, forehead against Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock brought his hands up to stroke John’s arms, and John had to wonder just who was comforting who.

“If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to.” Sherlock’s voice was low in his ear. Soft, soft.

“No. We can do this. If you need it, ask. I‘ll say no if I have to.” John ran his hand down Sherlock’s spine, turning that small reassuring connection into something a little more charged. “But I’m not saying no.”

They didn’t normally discuss what was going to happen. John usually set something up and Sherlock followed pretty happily. There was sometimes a post-scene dissection of what had worked best, but so far there hadn’t been any tedious assembly of kink menus.

There was something to be said for surprise and spontaneity, but right now Sherlock needed specificity. “What do you want me to do?”

Sherlock didn’t move, but when John stroked him his muscles uncoiled, leaving his shoulders a little less square. “Just that. I want you to touch me.”

“Would’ve done that anyway.” He was running his hand up and down, veering up to the nape of Sherlock’s neck and the curls at the base of his skull that John never seemed to tire of. “Soft or hard? Pain or pleasure or both?”

“Pleasure. I need something other than this.”

“Don’t need a scene for that, but I think I can do it.” John smoothed the hair away from Sherlock’s neck and placed his lips there, feeling the soft skin and dry heat, inhaling the scent of expensive shampoo, witch hazel, static electricity. “Go to your room, strip. Lie down on the bed and spread your legs.”

Sherlock inhaled. “Are you going to fuck me? You haven’t...”

“We’ll talk about it.”

“That means --”

“We’ll talk about it.” He pushed Sherlock forward with a gentle hand. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

Sherlock went to his room, looking back only once, a flash of uncertainty that was quickly wiped away. John could have easily imagined it, because Sherlock was sometimes mistaken, but rarely uncertain.

But John didn’t think he had.

John went to his room and shed his own clothes, wanting skin contact with Sherlock rather than the slight domination afforded by remaining mostly clothed. Anything to exploit that physical connection Sherlock so desperately needed right now, but could not ask for without some stupid trumped-up intellectual excuse to himself. Maybe one day Sherlock would be able to ask for emotional intimacy without cloaking it in a scene, but that day wasn‘t here yet.

He removed a few things from a bag he’d brought home from the surgery, and picked up a bottle of lubricant before hopping down the stairs two at a time. They’d been taking turns in each other’s beds because they were both lazy about laundry.

John pushed the door open and...

...oh, hell.

Sherlock was stretched out on the crisp white cotton, the spread of his legs and the arch of his back obscene in the light from the small corner lamp. He’d arranged himself for maximum effect. His head pressed into the pillow, hair fanned around him like a halo, eyes slitted at John and the long line of his neck almost at its full extension. He sat back on one elbow, but the other hand was running down his own chest, lightly plucking at the nipple, diving down his sternum and playing over prominent ribs. Sherlock was spread wide, legs bent at the knees and feet flat on the mattress. His cock was already full, heavy against his own stomach. A come-fuck-me pose if ever John had seen one.

Sherlock had the prettiest cock he’d ever seen, built like him, long and lean, perfectly balanced and formed.

He wanted it in his mouth, badly. Wanted to fuck Sherlock badly, when it came down to it, shove into him hard and fast and rut away while Sherlock begged for it, take him to the brink again and again before pulling him off in concert. But it seemed too soon for that, too...something. He was missing something.

He didn’t want to fuck Sherlock for the first time in order erase a ghost of a memory. He didn’t want that first penetration to happen because of Mycroft-inspired spite.

The first time he was inside Sherlock, he didn’t want it to be just a fuck. And that unsettled him more than anything else that had happened in the last 24 hours.

John tossed his handful onto the bed and watched Sherlock’s eyes widen out of the calculated seduction he’d been using. A surprised Sherlock, perhaps. A turned on Sherlock, definitely. His lips parted on an oh of pleasure and his eyes lit up like serial murder and suicide. He craned forward to get a better look, but John pushed him back down with a firm hand.

“Lie back completely.”

\--- --- ---

Mycroft would regret what he’d tried, Sherlock would make sure of it. He didn’t know what would come of this, but it was Sherlock who had the final say in what would or would not be. Not Mycroft. Not even John.

[redact.]

Mycroft had never cared for Sherlock, and this was just another way to exert control over a facet of his life. Mycroft wallowed in self-important, narcissistic, bourgeois guilt and yanking Sherlock around by his (few) weak areas was considered adequate sop to his vestigial conscience. A woe-is-me masturbation of his failings because it was obviously Mycroft’s fault that his younger brother turned out like this, it couldn’t possibly be that the little brother was just naturally gifted when it came to trouble, even before.

[redact.]

The fat bastard. It never mattered how much weight he lost or gained, because sometimes fat was on the inside, like a festering sore that would not be expunged. A permanent abscess.

And Sherlock would remind him of that at every opportunity.

[redact.]

The fat arse.

[redact.]

The manipulative queen.

[redact.]

The bloody murderer.

[redact.]

[redact.]

[redact.]

[redact.]

[REDACT.]

Sherlock felt violence humming just beneath the surface of his skin, but there was no outlet. He couldn’t spar with John. Krav Maga was designed to kill your opponent by any means, not take out anger on your flatmate/lover. The dojo was too far away to cut the immediate edge off.

He needed...

He needed.

“John.”

He closed his eyes when John placed a hand on him, touching him in a way he hadn’t appreciated until recently. He wanted that touch, wanted it. Anger transmuting into anticipatory lust in perfect alchemy, John acting as catalyst. _Newton was an alchemist and a scientist proving there was no mutual exclusivity so he could have this without losing himself too._ There was precedent.

He’d had to justify too much to himself lately, but right now, asking John to do this with him was necessary. And he knew John would do it, he was a natural born rule breaker -- even his own rules.

Sherlock could force it, turn on what charm he was capable of, touch John back until his only option was to give in to the want Sherlock fed like a controlled blue flame. But, really, it was so much better if he just asked, so much better if John said yes and didn’t need to be seduced into it at all.

John’s hands and lips were warm against him where they moved, a wonder of soft friction that kindled a spark in under-appreciated nerve endings, a careful touch to his hair. His hair must fascinate John he touched it so much, and this, just this was what he wanted.

John, so easy. Asked and answered in barely a moment.

The sound of John’s voice and the few glimpses Sherlock had snatched of his face when he had been speaking to Mycroft were perturbing. The voice and the profile spoke of a deep insecurity over what was between them, and of shame about wanting it.

Part of John wanted to be convinced that he, _this_ , was bad.

Sherlock could prove him wrong, but he’d prefer it if John did the proving for him.

John’s finger curled against his earlobe, barely there, and the reaction it engendered was out of proportion to the action itself so that Sherlock had to suppress a shiver. Hard or soft, pleasure or pain, it didn’t matter as long as John was there.

All of John. On him, in him, as close as he could get because there was something wrong with Sherlock, something gruesome, the way he wanted to crawl inside John and wear him as a skin, borrow parts of John and keep them for himself, devour John and have his powers become Sherlock’s own, with eyes, with teeth, with tongue -- have John devour him in turn.

There was something very wrong here, but the thought of stopping it made the feeling of wrongness multiply exponentially.

He was not the Sherlock he had been six months ago, that much was certain. The pervasive wrongness he felt stemmed from the fact that he didn’t seem to care.

That this -- John touching him, John breathing heat and life into his ear, smelling of Sherlock’s French soap and the powder from disposable nitrile gloves, John directing him like this, in all things sexual, sending him to his room -- was normal function.

Optimal function, despite every previous theory he’d had on the subject.

Yet it was still not enough. It should inspire fear, the idea that he was so invested in this, and yet still not sated. It was gluttonous, when everything else that had come before had been the definition of ascetic. They’d been at this for several weeks, _three weeks four days eight scenes now nine; twenty-three sexual acts_ , and John had not yet penetrated Sherlock, nor been penetrated by him.

Which was suddenly what Sherlock wanted more than anything in the world.

So he followed John’s orders, stripped and spread himself. He’d give John everything he could, arch and writhe with as much deliberate allure as he could generate, body asking for John’s fuck even more than his mouth had, invitation with no words.

John’s reaction didn’t disappoint. He walked into the room naked, compact muscles, sturdy frame, scarred, sandy, serious. When he saw Sherlock, undulation of the spine, deliberately narrowed eyes, canting of the hips, his own eyes narrowed.

Fierce and provocative as he tossed a few things to the bed.

Lubricant, silicone-based. A speculum, stainless steel and two-pronged -- not the type used at the surgery. A knobby silicone vibrator smaller than a lipstick with a thin wand extension.

Sherlock couldn’t stop the widening of his eyes, his mouth, or the soft intake of breath even as he bit his own lip to stall words he wasn’t sure he should utter. He honestly didn’t even know what he was going to say.

They’d masturbated one another, watched and been watched, done frottage, intercrural, oral sex in multiple configurations, but there hadn’t been anything blatantly anal except for the shade of a finger along Sherlock’s perineum that feathered away into nothing once it reached his arse during a particularly sloppy and enthusiastic blowjob from John.

The speculum practically testified to the fact that Sherlock was going to get fucked. The lack of a condom said that it might not be with John’s cock.

And that would be...a waste.

He tried to sit up to get a better look at what John had brought, the toys, the nakedness of John that was still such a novelty and a pleasure, but he was stopped by a firm hand, that hard callused hand with its clever fingers, and an even firmer voice.

“Lie back completely.”

“What --”

“Shh.” John placed a finger to Sherlock’s lips. “You don’t need to anticipate what I’m doing to you.”

“Lie back and think of England?”

“Mmm. No. Lie back...” John pushed Sherlock into the bedding, spreading his fingers against Sherlock’s chest. “...and think of me.”

Sherlock would have argued, but John chose that moment to pinch Sherlock’s right nipple, thumb and forefinger biting down on the crinkling skin, twisting and pulling away only to do it again, and again. Soon the fingers were replaced by a wet mouth, breath chasing across the nub, humid air that quickly cooled on the skin, only to bloom into heat once more after John’s lips closed around it for a firm suck.

The nipple play was nice, but Sherlock didn’t catch fire until John clambered onto the bed to rest between Sherlock’s legs, hands pushing Sherlock’s knees open even wider. Then John shot forward, teeth to Sherlock’s chest, nips and bites and licks, a mark high up on his neck where it would show. Small, perfect teeth that worried at a nipple, pulling it away from his body until it was just this close to unbearable, fire and wet, a little flick of tongue tip to swollen end, before letting go, letting blood rush back, bringing its own sweet agony.

John’s hands kept him parted, John’s height made sure that John’s cock was nestled against his own, sliding in the precome that slicked their stomachs and the groove of Sherlock’s thigh. He could smell their sex now, hot slick and sweat, scent of erect flesh. It was more powerful in the creases, those hidden places where the hair trapped the musk; armpit, groin, the back of Sherlock’s neck where everything was oddly sensitive.

Strips of red from their earlier knife play were traced, first with hands, then with a tongue, a few of the deeper healing cuts catching against John’s lips. John groaned, and Sherlock could imagine that small taste of rehydrating blood calling up memories of the previous encounter.

John’s fingernails entered the fray, scratching their way across Sherlock’s abdominal muscles and lower belly all the way to his thighs, creating a path to follow with his mouth.

Sherlock could only fling his head back and let it happen, breath coming shallow and fast, choking on a cry when John did something particularly clever. Sherlock had found that sex was usually a lie between two people, but this...this was truth in motion. There was no pretense here, no crippling rules or avoidance, and this scared him with the eerie perfection of it all, this hyperreality that had no demarcation between reality and fantasy because the fantasy had become fact.

Never had the truth bothered Sherlock. Except, perhaps, it had right now.

And maybe the truth here was not so infinite, because when he clenched his eyes shut on the pain, he was able to tell himself that it was because of John’s teeth, leaving a mark.

There was a mouth at his thigh, his scrotum, the head of his cock, lipping, teasing, where he would prefer firm suction. There came the snap of rubber loud in the room, then gloved fingers smoothing cool jelly across his arse, a light touch, then a firm clinical push against the tight furl of his sphincter, at odds with the soft kisses John placed against his inner thigh. The finger breached, the muscle dilating with the need to have John in him now, right now, and he went in to the last knuckle, a dead on hit to the prostate, making Sherlock jump, shiver, gasp. “John.”

A chuckle from John, dark and knowing. A doctor’s knowledge of anatomy.

There was another pump of the lubricant, and then the finger was removed. It was a quick process, finger slipping out, cool greased metal taking its place and sliding in to the hilt, the wide flange at the base stopping the internal glide, so quick and smooth and cold, a surprise, a shiver-inducing conundrum because he wanted the slickness, the pressure, the movement against the gland, but the chill hardness made him contract around it with the need to expel the intrusion.

He couldn’t contain the moan it produced, or the slightly panicked look in his eyes, he was sure. He looked at John for something, reassurance, perhaps, but whatever it was, he found it, in John’s face, so intent on his own, in John’s hands, rubbing at his lower belly, rubber catching on the fine hairs there.

“God, that’s...”

“W-what?”

“...Brilliant.” John looked down at the speculum entering Sherlock’s body, and Sherlock wished that he could see what John was seeing, experience it as John was experiencing it, because the look on John’s face was...

“I’m going to open you up now.”

“Yes. Do it.”

John’s hands left his belly to adjust the mechanism on the speculum, and suddenly Sherlock could feel the bill-like flanges parting and exposing him, scissoring him open and screwing into place. The extensions had cut-aways to make most of his arse accessible, and there were parts of Sherlock that were suddenly feeling cool air for the very first time and it was...disconcerting. Odd. Vulnerable.

Exciting.

Yes.

John moved the speculum into the exact position he wanted it, and lost no time, taking another dollop of lube on two fingers and pressing it in to feel Sherlock’s interior walls, rubbing, rubbing, twisting, being a bloody tease until --

“Argh!”

“Good, yes?” There was a bit of laughter and breathlessness in John’s voice as he homed in on Sherlock’s prostate, taking up a steady rubbing rhythm that made Sherlock’s eyes roll back.

“Fuck.” Sherlock bucked his hips, trying to get a bit more pressure, but John held him steady and didn’t let him move.

“Just let it happen, okay. We have time.”

Time? It wasn’t a question of time. It was a matter of depth and pressure, length of stroke, and...and...”John!”

John just kept his touch light and even, a back and forth motion that didn’t vary. Too soft to hit home, too regular in its movements. Sherlock tried to swivel his hips, screw himself into John, screw those impossible fingers right up and into his prostate, but John was suddenly a dense weight on Sherlock’s hips, holding him tight to the bed, biting his hip in warning. And that stroking never modified or wavered.

The feeling was building, though, like mercury in a thermometer, a welling tension in his balls, his cock, a thrumming of the blood that wasn’t going to lead directly to orgasm, but allowed a glimmer of it to appear on the horizon. His cock was hard and flushed, leaking from the tip, a steady trickle of fluid that wouldn’t stop streaming. A thin line of pre ejaculate connected the head of his cock and his stomach, wobbling with every motion, but it didn’t break. The sight was hypnotic.

“John! No!” He had an idea of what John was doing, and he didn’t think he’d be able to handle it. Not like that. Not like this it was too little, not when he felt so close to actually...”No milking. Please, John. No milking. I want...I NEED to orgasm.”

John didn’t speed up at all, but he brought his unoccupied hand up to Sherlock’s face, feeling at the light stubble, calming with his fingers just as much as his other fingers were striking sparks.

“Massaging, not milking. Don’t worry, I’m not going to drain you. You’ll get off on this.”

“We.” Sherlock was suddenly adamant. “We’ll get off on this.”

John’s response was a non-committal hum, which didn’t give Sherlock what he wanted. Sherlock felt like he’d been denied everything he wanted all day.

“Tell me you’re going to fuck me. Tell me you -- Agh!” John prodded Sherlock on the next thrust, a hard jolt into his prostate, a tuning fork to the spine, his shaft, a hard throb of _wantneednowfuck_ curling up low in his belly, waiting to fight its way out.

“My timetable.” John didn’t sound like he had enough air, and his eyelids had gotten heavy and hooded when Sherlock started thrashing in the sheets. “And you...you’re still thinking too much.”

“There’s no such thing as --”

John cut him off, eating his breath, then his lips. It was a softer kiss at first, like the one Sherlock had given him in front of the fireplace, a sweet press of lips, PG Tips and Choccie Dodgers, that kept pace with the resumption of the slow and steady stroking that John had previously employed. It was meandering and wet, John’s tongue sweeping through his mouth like a blind man might, cataloging features thoroughly, and paying special attention to the different textures involved, the rougher top of the tongue, the softer sides, slippery against their counterpart, the nobbled corrugation of the upper palate. John groaned into the kiss, more so than he had when Sherlock had stroked his cock.

The feeling of triumph, that he could make John sound like that, merely kissing and letting himself be touched, was overwhelming in a novel way, made Sherlock go lax under John’s touch, all tension bleeding from his bones like the melting of glacial ice. John was happy. A happy John wouldn’t try to change their successful dynamic, wouldn’t go away for Sherlock’s own bloody good. John was acting like he was gentling a horse, so Sherlock allowed himself to be gentled. Sherlock went soft and willing for John, soft like his tongue, and allowed John to stroke him however John cared to.

John made a murmur of accord as Sherlock relaxed under his hands, a small whimper of want, cock pressing for a moment against Sherlock’s thigh to relieve a little pressure of his own.“Yes. Exactly like that. It’s good isn’t it?”

“Good. Yes.” Better than good. He felt like butter, melting under direct heat, slippery against John’s probing fingers, the fingers inside him, the fingers of John’s other hand tracing over where he was stretched around the speculum, puckered crepe skin pulled taut and sensitive.

John increased the pressure to his gland, added a bit more force to the thrust, and that was even better, and Sherlock couldn’t help the whine that built in the back of his throat. It became a full on whimper when John ducked his head and Sherlock felt that moist tongue on the rim of his anus, probing the edge of the speculum, and the edge of Sherlock’s control. John’s tongue seemed impossibly flexible and agile against his straining flesh, and he wished that evolution had shifted the prostate a few centimeters south because he wanted John’s tongue there, too.

There was a twisting movement, then a void as the speculum was withdrawn, but Sherlock didn’t have time to mourn, because there were suddenly three fingers filling him, curling up to catch his prostate, shoving in hard and fast and spot on and it was his birthday and new years at once, fireworks behind his eyelids, like golden chrysanthemums, because the small vibrating wand was there too, next to the fingers, making everything pulse hummingbird fast.

“Can you take a fourth?”

Could he? It seemed like too much already, but too much had been amazing so far, and he wanted as much of John as possible, any way he could get it. “Y-yes.”

He sucked in a harsh breath through his teeth when John’s pinkie breached him, pulling taut skin even tighter, feeling even fuller than he had before. The burn was on the good side of painful, a burn he could feel in every extremity, but the pleasure never ceased to stoke higher, and the ache in his throbbing cock became more pronounced with the need to orgasm. His prostate felt battered and weary and good, and he’d probably be sore tomorrow, he welcomed the soreness, but he needed more to crest, to put himself above that threshold and find true release, not just of the body, but the mind as well.

And John moved up, licking Sherlock’s cock along the way, settling above him, fingers planted deep, thrusting and curling in time with the rapid plucking rhythm of Sherlock’s heart. John’s eyes, butter rum and heat, stared into his own, intently. Sherlock wanted to close his eyes, or turn away, but he was caught, mesmerized, and he didn’t even want to blink under the intensity of that stare, could only watch John’s face, his panting breath, the pink flush that bled down his neck and even his chest.

“Sherlock.” John’s eyes closed for an exquisite moment, brow furrowed in pleasure so acute it had become pain, a look Sherlock supposed he wore as well. “Touch yourself. Make yourself come.”

He’d been motionless for so long that he hesitated at first, until John clasped his own hand around Sherlock’s, guiding it to Sherlock’s aching hardness, and Sherlock started a quick, tight stroking, unable to slow down because he needed to come now, needed to come looking into John’s eyes like this, feeling John’s fingers move against his arse, his gland, a rapid tattoo that was going to break him, remake him.

“John.” Sherlock’s face screwed up, a ridiculous sex rictus he was sure, but it couldn’t be helped. He was dimly aware of John’s other hand wrapping around John’s cock, moving against Sherlock’s thigh as John masturbated himself. John was bent over him, naked chest pale against the twilight of the room, dog tags dangling to hit Sherlock’s chest before John heaved over him, straightening up to look down on Sherlock, fingers still planted inside him, but the other hand was a rapid blur on his own member. John’s cock was just like him, stocky and powerful, and Sherlock wanted to touch him too, suck him down , drink his come from the source, but this was good too, being able to see everything, being seen as well.

John was looking desperate, must have felt it, because his hands suddenly tightened everywhere, and he started to falter.

“Sherlock. Come.” John groaned before he could go on. “Do it. Now.”

It shouldn’t have been that easy. Sherlock shouldn’t have been that easy, but it was. He was. Everything contracted in the space of a heartbeat, compressing into an infinitely hot and dense dot before exploding outward in heat and light and chaos.

Sherlock wasn’t sure that he had ever come with his eyes open before, but he did so now, unable to take his eyes off of John who was jittering into his own orgasm, panting as the rush took him too. His eyes were bright and rabid as they drank in Sherlock’s finish, the come gushing over his fist, long fingers slackening as he grew sensitive. John made an anguished noise and clenched all over, muscles bunching before the tension rolled off with his orgasm. His own cock pulsed, and he aimed the ropes of come at Sherlock, striping Sherlock’s cock, his hand, his neatly groomed pubic hair, the entrance to Sherlock’s ass where John’s fingers were still buried.

John removed his fingers and the vibrating bullet, but collapsed half on top of Sherlock, not that Sherlock minded.

He managed to turn his head in the direction of Sherlock, face half-hidden in the pillow so that Sherlock could only make out a cheeky raised eyebrow and the tail end of a smirk.

“Good, then?”

“Mmm.”

“Feeling better?”

“Mmmm.”

“Ah, pre-verbal. I’m doing something right I suppose.”

Sherlock huffed and John moved closer until they were touching all along their lengths, sweaty and sticky and not caring a bit.

“Nice. That’s...good to know. Sometimes I’m just guessing at what you need.”

“I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You seem to be a savant.”

They lay together for a while, listening to calming heartbeats. Neither felt particularly tired. Sherlock felt rejuvenated, but he was hesitant to give up this moment with John.

“Thank you.” Sherlock brought his arm around John and smoothed his dirty blond hair into something tidier than disarray.

“For what?”

“Putting up with him. Defending me. Not treating me as if I’m available for public consumption.” Sherlock smiled, feeling lazy and lion-heavy. “Pick one.”

“How much did you hear...before?”

“Most of it.”

“I’m not Victor.” John was earnest. Sherlock had always thought that earnestness was what happened when stupidity went to college, but John always proved the exception to his rules.

Sherlock squeezed his hand. “I know. You give too much. And he...he didn’t have anything to give. Full stop.”

“And you don’t give away a thing.” John’s tone was off, humorous. Sarcasm?

“Of course not.”

This time, John’s snort of amusement was obvious, and Sherlock was getting to know the affectionate you’re-an-idiot look a little too well. “You give away more than you think.”

“How so?”

“Semantics.” John turned his head on the pillow to look straight at Sherlock, smile fading. Opera seria instead of opera buffa. “You use words precisely. And you called yourself a sociopath.”

“I thought we went over this.”

“Different context. You called yourself a sociopath, when psychopath means exactly the same thing.”

“Not completely.” John was clever. And maybe Sherlock had been too transparent.

“Psychopathy is genetic, and sociopathy is --”

“Social.”

“A reaction to childhood stimulus. Learned, taught, something like that. Which implies a bit more than you thought.”

“John. I can‘t --”

“I’m not. I won’t. But I want you to know.” John touched his face, nose, eyelids, placed his fingers to Sherlock’s lips, closer than a kiss. “If you need to...”

“I know.”

They lay quietly for a moment, the only sounds their breathing, a steady drip from the tap and muffled evening street.

But Sherlock couldn’t let things lie as they were. “Why?”

“Why what? Why this?” John gestured to the wrecked bed and their mutual nudity. “Or in a more existential sense?” John’s lips quirked up at the corner.

“Why won’t you fuck me?”

John frowned, but it was a thinking expression that Sherlock was very familiar with. “You asked me once, what I’d be thinking if I was facing certain death.”

“Please God let me live.”

“Yes. But I wasn’t afraid of death.”

“No? No. You wouldn’t be.”

“I was afraid of not fulfilling my purpose there. I thought there might be something wrong with me. You know, later, in the hospital, when my shoulder was healing and all I could do was think. Who isn’t afraid of death? Who enjoys that kind of danger? It’s a sign of psychosis.”

“You aren’t psychotic.”

“I know. But I worried. And then suddenly one day I was afraid again, and I realized that I wasn’t beyond fear. I’m still not afraid of death. I was prepared to die in the sand, I was prepared to die at the pool. I just...have different priorities.”

“What is it? What made you fear?”

“I thought you were a genius?”

“Not at this sort of thing.”

“It’s you. Us. Whenever you decide that you don’t want this anymore.”

“You think I’ll end it. So you try to keep your distance?”

John shook his head and wished, not for the first time, that Sherlock wasn’t so bloody stupid about some things. “I can’t be distant from you.”

“But you tried.”

“And failed. I’m failing now.”

Sherlock threaded his fingers through John’s and tried not to think about what it meant. “But I like the way you fail.”

“Thanks.”

“Sarcasm again?”

“Mmm. You’re getting better at that.”

“Wish I could say the same, but you’re still an idiot.” Sherlock said it with a smile, and John, true to habit, took no offence.

“How‘s that?”

“You’re forgetting that obsessive compulsion is a part of Asperger’s Syndrome.”  
Sherlock looked away from John, suddenly intent on the ceiling and the cracks he had already memorized in their entirety.

“Hard to forget. I live in the same flat as you.”

“You know I don’t give up my obsessions lightly.” He felt John go still, but couldn’t shake the feeling that this was too much laid bare.

“Or at all.”

“Then you should know that I’m not going anywhere.” Sherlock didn’t stop himself from reaching out with their clasped hands, placing them on John’s hip in an embarrassingly tentative fashion. He felt more exposed here, now, than when he had been naked and spread-eagle on top of the duvet. “This is just the anacrusis. We aren’t even close to the denouement. Not unless...”

“Unless what?”

But Sherlock had had enough of the subject, and turned his head away, blinking. “I don’t understand you, John. Not at all.”

“I find that...completely inexplicable.”

“So do I.” Sherlock frowned, but it didn’t feel very intense, post-sex. “It’s very inconvenient. I had calculated all of the probabilities.”

John, beyond all reason, looked unaccountably smug when he curled into Sherlock’s side.

“’Salright.” He placed a kiss on Sherlock’s naked shoulder. “I’m very improbable.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. I've already started the fourth story in the series.
> 
> Please review.


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